This holiday season I received a big box from our Data Solutions Group that I’m told contains an ARX for my play-time and will no doubt fill your reading time in the new year. Assuming you read my blog anyway ;-). Those guys rock, and pulled through for me in a major way to get this delivered.

I’m stoked to have one to play with, and will blog for you from set-up to messing with it. I’m terrible about that. Give me new hardware and I play with it until I understand most of the ways it breaks and how to fix it. Most breaks in the IT realm are user error, so I can make just about anything break if I tinker with it long enough.

And the gift for you this festive time of year? Oracle and F5 are finished testing the Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control Plug-in for LTM versions 9.4 and 10.0.1. So if you’re an Oracle customer with BIG-IP LTMs deployed, pop over to the Oracle pages of DevCentral and download the plug-in. It’s certified by Oracle, and monitors your BIG-IP like any other Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control.

At this time you have to be a registered user on DevCentral, but we will no doubt be like all the other OEM Grid controls available on Oracle TechNet. Sorry for the inconvenience, but this stuff doesn’t happen overnight and this is an iffy time of year to count on people being around to update websites and such.

Meanwhile, anyone want to take a guess at which geek toys I picked up for Lori this year? Anyone?

Until next time – which will likely be next year since I’m off until the 4th, and traveling the 4th…

And no, the picture is not the ARX I expect to find in that box… Mine should be smaller ;-).